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Office of Management and Budget Blog

Last week, as snow forced federal offices to close, OMB was hard at work opening up more of the Federal government – at least online. Today, we are debuting the OIRA Dashboard, an easy-to-use website that will allow people to track the progress of federal rules and regulations that have been submitted for interagency review and find other relevant information about the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Putting this information online and in an accessible format is one of the ways that OMB is applying the principles of the Open Government Directive to rulemaking and regulatory policy.

It’s been a day since the 2011 Budget was released, and analysts and journalists have written about what it means for individual agencies, specific issues, and states. But let’s not lose sight of the big picture. The President’s Budget represents an important step towards fiscal sustainability: it put forward $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over the next ten years, even excluding savings from the assumed ramp-down in war funding over time. Including these war savings, the deficit reduction proposed in the President’s Budget rises to $2.1 trillion.

Nearly a year ago, the Congress and the President joined together to enact the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, one of the most sweeping economic recovery efforts in our nation’s history. Since then, and although more steps can and should be undertaken to promote job growth, the Recovery Act has spurred economic activity and thereby helped to avert a depression.

Today, the President transmitted the FY 2011 Budget to the Congress. In about an hour, he will deliver remarks about the Budget, and after that I will be taking questions from the press with CEA Chair Romer. This post gives readers of OMBlog a brief overview of the document.

A Wall Street Journal op-ed today by the prior Administration’s CEA Chair, Edward Lazear, observes that the ratio of federal spending-to-GDP has risen by 14 percent since 2008—and that the transition from 2008 to 2009 saw the greatest annual increase in spending in the last 30 years.

In May, we released our Terminations, Reductions, and Savings volume. It put forward more than 120 cuts and reductions, totaling $17 billion, to programs that were duplicative, ineffective, or outdated. At the time, cynics said that we’d never be able to eliminate these programs – some of which had been around for decades. And it’s true that every one of the programs has a supporter, and there have been – and will continue to be – vocal and powerful interests that oppose almost any budget cut.

This afternoon, I will participate in the White House Forum on Modernizing Government. More than 50 of the nation’s leading CEOS are attending today’s forum, bringing their ideas for how the government can use technology to save money and improve performance.

We are closer than ever before to passing fiscally responsible health reform legislation. So it’s not a surprise that the most reflexively and ideologically partisan commentators are lashing out. Today, it’s the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal.

Congratulations, Nancy Fichtner, on becoming the first-ever winner of the President’s SAVE Award — a contest for Federal employees to come up with the best idea to save taxpayer dollars and make the government perform more effectively and efficiently. Since voting began on Monday, OMB received 84,670 and her idea was picked from the “final four” as the winner. On Monday, December 21, Nancy will present her idea to President Obama at the White House.

As many of you know, earlier this year, President Obama launched the SAVE Award — a program that offered every federal employee the chance to submit ideas about how government can save money and perform better. Over the course of three weeks, federal employees submitted more than 38,000 ideas. Staff at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) assessed the submissions and narrowed them down to the final four ideas presented below.

During the first decade of the last century when Theodore Roosevelt sat in the Oval Office, my great-grandparents emigrated from Hungary to the United States. On Friday, in the first decade of this century, I sat in the Roosevelt Room – adorned with a portrait of the Rough Rider – for a fascinating meeting with the Prime Minister of Hungary.

On his very first day in office, President Obama signed a memorandum to all federal agencies directing them to break down barriers to transparency, participation, and collaboration between the federal government and the people it is to serve.

Atul Gawande — surgeon and journalist — once again writes a trenchant article examining a key question about health reform: in particular, how can we improve care and reduce costs? Gawande’s answer: there is no single, right answer.

At the end of September, OMB launched the President’s SAVE Award – a contest for federal employees to come up with the best idea to save taxpayer dollars and make the government perform more effectively and efficiently.

One of the criticisms leveled by skeptics of health insurance reform is that the hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare savings being proposed won’t actually be implemented since efforts to cut waste never stick. "Congress is notorious for passing Medicare savings, and then after the cuts take place and the political groups get activated, we restore all the money," one Republican congressman told the Wall Street Journal last month.

For those skeptical about the ability to restrain health care cost growth in heath reform, read Ron Brownstein’s latest article on how the bills now being considered in Congress would transform the health care system so that it delivers better care to more Americans at far less cost.

This weekend, the Senate completed the OMB team when it confirmed Dan Gordon to lead the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP). Dan brings more than two decades of professional contracting experience to OMB, having most recently served as Acting General Counsel at GAO. He understands the President’s goal of improving the contracting system in order to provide the best value for taxpayers. Dan will be at the center of this effort to deliver better value to the American people at a lower cost to the government’s bottom line.

In today’s Washington Post, I have an op-ed discussing an issue critical to the country’s fiscal future: health-care reform that provides the highest quality of care and helps stem rising health-care costs. In the piece, I lay out the four key pillars of fiscally-responsible health reform as identified by a group of the nation’s leading economists: deficit neutrality, a tax on high-cost plans, a Medicare commission, and delivery system reform. As the debate moves to the Senate and we move closer to a final bill, I argue that the greatest risk we run is not completing health reform and letting this opportunity to lay a new foundation for our economy and our country pass us by.

Each year, taxpayers lose billions of dollars in wasteful improper payments by the federal government to individuals, organizations, and contractors. "Improper payments" is an umbrella term that covers a number of financial transactions — overpayments to individuals or firms is one example; benefit payments to ineligible program participants is another. In 2008, improper payments totaled $72 billion; in 2009, they totaled $98 billion — an increase driven by improved detection and the significant increase in federal outlays associated with the economic downturn. These errors and mistakes are unacceptable. Taxpayers deserve to know that their dollars are being spent wisely and effectively.

Every two weeks or so, there seems to be a story ringing the alarm bells over the fiscal dimension of health reform. As I've said time and again, the President is committed to signing a health reform bill that is deficit neutral in the first decade — and deficit reducing thereafter. The legislation under consideration in the Senate and the bill passed Saturday by the House both meet these tests.

Last Friday marked the end of the first month of the OMB pedometer challenge. As a team, we took a whopping 51,337,900 in the first month. This is equivalent to walking almost 26,000 miles — over a thousand miles more than walking the full circumference of the earth. Quite an accomplishment.

I delivered a speech today at New York University about the Administration’s efforts to jumpstart the economy and to build a secure and prosperous recovery by putting the nation on a path to fiscal sustainability — issues that are especially important to the students of today and generations to come.

Today on Capitol Hill, OMB Deputy Director for Management Jeff Zients testified in front of the Senate Budget Committee about the Administration’s efforts to improve the performance of the federal government so that it is more efficient and effective.

As I have said repeatedly — and as my colleague, Christy Romer, is discussing today at the Center for American Progress — reducing health care cost growth is the key to our fiscal future. To anyone who has studied our fiscal facts, this central conclusion seems indisputable.

We often hear about people who are unlucky in love, but what of those who are unlucky in the business cycle? What is the impact of being born two decades before a significant economic downturn, such that you graduate from college and enter the labor force in the middle of a period of high unemployment? As the class of 2009 is keenly aware, entering the labor market during a recession has immediate negative effects. Job offers are harder to find: according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, less than 20 percent of the class of 2009 graduated from college with a job offer in hand, compared to 25 percent in the class of 2008 and more than 50 percent in the class of 2007. Whereas year to year starting salaries on average tend to increase, with the tough competition in this year’s labor market, average starting offers for the class of 2009 are slightly down.

Tonight, the Senate confirmed Danny Werfel as Controller, Office of Federal Financial Management (OFFM). This is great news for OMB, as Danny brings broad experience and financial acumen to the table. His skills will be tested, as there are serious challenges facing the federal government to improve transparency and drive better results for the American people.

Over the past few days, a number of news articles about health reform have suggested that efforts to control the growth of health care costs are in jeopardy. Great strides to control long-term health care costs have been made in both the Senate and the House — fulfilling a key goal of the President’s health reform effort.

This afternoon, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its estimate of the budgetary and coverage effects of the Senate Finance Committee health reform legislation. The bottom line is that this mark demonstrates that we can expand coverage and improve quality while being fiscally responsible. It does not add one dime to the deficit over the next 10 years and, according to CBO, reduces deficits significantly thereafter.

Especially in these difficult economic times, it’s critical that taxpayer dollars are used wisely. We can’t just keep continuing with business as usual in Washington where programs get funded because they always have – even if they may be ineffective, duplicative, or outdated. That is why the President has made changing how the federal government does business and how taxpayer dollars are spent a top priority. And, as I have written about before, it’s why we are putting an emphasis on objective, rigorous evaluations to help drive funding decisions across the government.